It seems like the latest thing to parody soaps on television. In the last few weeks, Chelsea Lately on E! and The Colbert Report on Comedy Central have poked fun at daytime soaps. The Soup is another show that has occasional daytime serial clips. As long as I feel like people are being silly without being disrespectful, I can handle it.
Chelsea Lately picked on One Life to Live on two separate occasions in the month of November. The first focused on James and Starr, and how she wanted to sleep with him after Cole was sent to prison. The humor in the clip was seeing James list why he was against them having sex. On the bottom of the screen there was a counter, which listed 19 reasons why and 10 of those were Cole’s 10 year prison sentence. Being kidnapped twice, the murder of Hope’s babysitter and being nearly buried alive were also included. Looking at it from a realistic standpoint is impossible as even as a long time soap viewer what Starr went through in the last few weeks is very far out there. This much drama used to be told over a much longer span of time. The other clip was from Thanksgiving when Inez was propositioned by Clint to sleep with his brother Bo. Chelsea commented that she does the same thing for her brother and how come an elderly man was imitating her. She stated the writers of OLTL were obviously stealing from Chelsea's life. Well, that scene was funny even without Chelsea’s thoughts due to the weirdness between Inez and Clint as Inez assumed that Clint was asking her to sleep with him. On top of that, there is the additional odd factor for anyone seeing this clip who watched Guiding Light due to the actors past lives on that show. Here is a link to Chelsea Handler's official Youtube channel where one can check out these two episodes.
The Colbert Report made fun of product placement. How soaps have lost millions of viewers in the last 20 years and how As the World Turns and Guiding Light have gone off the air. Stephen and Paul did a parody, with a patch, which is so Days of Our Lives 1980s. They were non-identical twins that were feuding, and product placements for Cheerios (not the ones on Glee) and other products. They showed some product placement clips from Days. One was with Melanie, Nathan and Cheerios, the other was with Sami, EJ and Chex Mix. At the end of the episode, Stephen was sitting on his desk munching some Chex Mix, so the product placement did its job and got him hungry. This fan blog (No Fact Zone) has a summary of the episode, which aired 11/30, which can be read here or visit the Colbert Nation site. Other soaps do product placement, and I wrote about that very topic back about 18 months ago on this blog.
While watching The Colbert Report, I thought about Stephen’s Guiding Light boxed set and I wanted to figure out how many disks approximately there would be in a first season set and how the math would go on from there. Of course, my first reaction was drooling and wishing a set like this existed for GL from many years ago, or for any daytime soap for that matter as only Dark Shadows is available for purchase on DVD in its entirety. That is on my list of covet items, but my lack of self-discipline and follow through in watching all of the episodes, is why have not allowed myself to buy the program.
For the sake of this entry, I am using that two weeks of 15 minute shows, and one week of 30 minute shows can fit on a disk. Due to compression standards and such I’ve seen disks that hold a lot more than that and blu-ray is another situation entirely. I am not including math for shows that were 45 minutes as I have no idea how long those programs were without advertising or the oddities like Another World at 90 minutes plus spinoffs and how many disks it would take to cover that show within that time frame.
The math breaks down as follows not counting any special features if available or preemptions:
15 Minute Radio and/or Television Show
26 disks and 13 cases maximum (2 weeks of episodes per disk). In a year, if you would watch one case every week, you’d get through at least 4 years worth of episodes. This was GL's original length.
30 Minute Program
52 disks and 26 cases maximum (1 week of episodes per disk). From watching Ryan’s Hope reruns on Soapnet, in about 6 month’s time, one could watch about a year worth of episodes.
1 Hour Program
2 episodes per disk – 130 disks, 65 cases maximum or 3 episodes per disk –87 disks, 44 cases maximum. This looks to be closest to the set that Colbert had on his desk. For many soap operas, there would be 30 years or more worth of episodes if they were in this format.
They say no publicity is bad publicity, so seeing soap operas mentioned in the public is a good thing as at least the comedy was done by people who weren’t completely ignorant. Even in mocking, they are reminding people that they still do exist. That’s important, and if their inclusion on Chelsea Lately or The Colbert Report got people talking or even better watching they should be seen as beneficial.
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